What is Digital Forensics?

Digital forensics is the practice of gathering and assessing digital evidence in a way that ensures its integrity and admissibility in court.

Digital forensics is a classification of forensic science. It is used to investigate cybercrime but can also assist with criminal and civil cases. For example, cybersecurity teams may use digital forensics to identify the perpetrators of a malware attack. Moreover, law enforcement authorities may utilise this service to analyse data from a murder suspect’s gadgets.

It also has numerous applications since it treats digital evidence like any other type. On the other hand, investigators adopt a tight forensics protocol (a chain of custody) when handling digital evidence to avoid tampering.

Furthermore, the cybersecurity landscape refers to digital and computer forensics as interchangeable entities. However, digital forensics technically involves the collection of evidence from any digital device. In contrast, computer forensics involves gathering evidence specifically from computing devices, such as computers, tablets, mobile phones, and devices with a CPU.

Importance of Digital Forensics

The rise of electronic crimes in the 2000s and the broad decentralisation of law enforcement agencies prompted the trend toward uniformity and competent digital forensics. With more crimes utilising digital devices—and more people involved in prosecuting those crimes—officials required processes to ensure that criminal investigations dealt with digital evidence in a way that would be admissible in court.

Today, digital forensics is only becoming more relevant. As society’s reliance on computer systems and cloud-based technology grows, people spend more time online on an ever-increasing range of devices, including mobile phones, tablets, IoT devices, connected devices, and more.

As a result, investigators can use more data—from more sources and in more forms—as digital evidence to analyse and evaluate various illegal activities, such as cyberattacks, data breaches, and criminal and civil investigations.

Furthermore, investigators and law enforcement agencies must properly gather, manage, analyse, and keep all physical or digital evidence. Otherwise, data could be destroyed, tampered with, or declared inadmissible in court.

Process of Digital Forensics Investigation

1. Data Collection: Determine which digital devices or storage media include data, metadata, or other digital information related to the digital forensics inquiry. Law enforcement organisations will take evidence from a possible crime scene to ensure a precise chain of custody in criminal cases. To maintain evidence integrity, forensics experts generate a forensic duplicate of the data using a hard drive duplicator or forensic imaging tool. Following the duplication procedure, they protect the original data and focus the remainder of the investigation on the copies to prevent manipulation.
2. Examination: Investigators focus on data and metadata for indicators of cybercriminal behaviour. Forensic examiners can recover digital data from a wide range of sources, including web browser histories, chat logs, remote storage devices, erased space, accessible disk spaces, operating system caches, and almost any other component of a computerised system.
3. Data Analysis: Forensic analysts collect data and insights from digital evidence through various approaches and digital forensic tools. For example, to uncover “hidden” data or metadata, they may leverage specialised forensic techniques such as live analysis, which evaluates still-running systems for volatile data or reverse steganography, which reveals hidden data using steganography. Investigators may also use proprietary and open-source tools to link findings with specific threat actors.
4. Reporting: Forensic experts create a formal report outlining their analysis, including what happened and who may be responsible once the investigation ends.  However, reports still differ depending on the case. They may make recommendations for correcting vulnerabilities to prevent future cyberattacks. These reports are also commonly used in court to show digital evidence, and they are shared with law enforcement, insurers, regulators, and other authorities.

Today, forensic providers employ a wide range of digital forensics tools. These tools can be hardware- or software-based and can analyse data sources without tampering with the data.

How can iZOOlogic help my Company or Organisation?

Find out how iZOOlogic can provide the best Digital Forensics solutions through our Threat & Forensics Analysis services.

To find out more about how iZOOlogic can help protect your company’s cyber security, schedule a demo.